We know exactly how it's gonna go: protag seeks approval, constantly ****s up and gets his ass saved by grumpy mentor, there's a Moment wherein this dynamic ends (usually bc grumpy mentor is all "I'm disappointed in you" and protag is all "UR NOT MY REAL DAD" and they Go Their Separate Ways, or grumpy mentor sacrifices himself to save protag; w/e) and then protag has to prove himself entirely on his own against the BIGGEST OBSTACLE YET, and he succeeds in a crowning moment of triumph/heartwarming and grumpy mentor-now-basically-dad is impressed + gives the Dad Approval and they now have a mutual respect & understanding of one another that is on more equal ground.

It's the same every time and I EAT IT UP EVERY TIME.[/QUOTE]
Sounds like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. xD

I'm not a big fan of having a character die, treating it as immensely tragic, then having them immediately brought back to life through some BS. It kind of sucks the tragedy out of the scene when thirty seconds later the character is up again saying "lol i'm fine now".

I hate it a thousand times more when the person is brought back to life by tears.

Along a similar vein, I really hate Immunity Because Friendship/Love. Like when a super mega ultra death blow should have killed you but you survived because you have friends who love you or whatever. Unless you have magic powers fueled by love as established earlier in the series do not pull that ****.

I don't mind it if the fact that you have Friends and Love otherwise grants you an advantage you wouldn't otherwise have which allows you to triumph; that's usually really cheesy but can be done just fine. But if the only reason you survive is LITERALLY just the power of love out of nowhere, with no reasonable established mechanism to play it out, that's just lazy ********.

(Looking at you Harry Potter tbh... that series is good but the dumbest part of it is LILY'S MOM LOVE IS STRONGER THAN ALL OF TEH OTHER MAGIXXORZ)

I've learned that I may like the lesson "Humanity sucks sometimes, but we decide to do the right thing when it matters" more than I have any right to. When it's done well, there's a lot of chance for character growth from both protagonist and antagonist. I'm a real sucker for it.

So, as for a cliche I despise it's the "I'm strong but I'm kidnapped anyway" cliche. Because the writer has to have a kidnapped princess to up the stakes, but OH NO that's sexist. So instead of not doing that, or finding something else to fight over, or... hell, just going with it but giving you a reason to like said princess and want to rescue her; they show her practicing archery or swordplay and she stands on equal footing if not beating the protagonist clean. She's shown to be unlike most princesses, and she wants to be herself or go out and see the world or shag the hero, whatever! Then the villain kidnaps her and none of that mattered. The hero will beat the villain, but the kidnap bait, despite having more often than not MORE training, will sit there and do nothing in comparison once they get taken. That's not to say it can't work, but if you REALLY hate using kidnapping as a plot device, don't try to wink at me before you do it anyway. That doesn't make it okay, it just annoys people.

[QUOTE="Apollo the Just, post: 1639867, member: 30977"]
(Looking at you Harry Potter tbh... that series is good but the dumbest part of it is LILY'S MOM LOVE IS STRONGER THAN ALL OF TEH OTHER MAGIXXORZ)[/QUOTE]
It is a little silly, but I do appreciate the fact that it's an event/plot point that only happens once. And I think it works well in the HP world because of how magic works--it's a force inside of someone that can be unleashed without their intention or even their knowledge. For instance, in HP1, Harry keeps having magical experiences happen to him when he feels strong emotions like anger or jealousy or embarrassment, because he has this inner power that he just hasn't learned to control yet, which he then is trained to do at Hogwarts, focusing magic through a wand. Wands were created not to create magic, but to channel a wizard's inner energy. (For the record, it's HP extended canon that other wizarding cultures, particularly in Africa, prefer to cast magic without wands altogether, focusing their training on natural channeling above all else.)

Lily's love for Harry, as far as I understand it, wouldn't have been the material cause of Harry's survival, but more like the efficient cause; rather than love actively doing the saving, love caused Lily to unleash a magic far greater than anything she or Voldemort, or maybe anyone, had ever seen.

...so yeah I get what you mean overall. But I do think HP actually has really good in-universe reasons as to why it works.[DOUBLEPOST=1501755062,1501754251][/DOUBLEPOST][QUOTE="Valigarmander, post: 1639864, member: 30663"]I'm not a big fan of having a character die, treating it as immensely tragic, then having them immediately brought back to life through some BS. It kind of sucks the tragedy out of the scene when thirty seconds later the character is up again saying "lol i'm fine now".

I hate it a thousand times more when the person is brought back to life by tears.[/QUOTE]
Cheapening the meaning of death is irksome to me. I always make fun of Supernatural when my wife is upset over the death of a character, because NO ONE ACTUALLY DIES IN THAT SHOW. The characters have been resurrected so many times that death is just so meaningless now.

Cheapening the meaning of death is irksome to me. I always make fun of Supernatural when my wife is upset over the death of a character, because NO ONE ACTUALLY DIES IN THAT SHOW. The characters have been resurrected so many times that death is just so meaningless now.

I think this was one of my biggest gripes with Final Fantasy IV. After the third or fourth time someone turned up A-OK after their tragic sacrifice I was pretty sick of it. I was surprised when Tellah didn't return from the dead by the end.

I really like it when inanimate objects or nonliving things become imbued with a spirit or will of sorts that surfaces as a result of a bond between people and that object (or magic, or both). By far my favorite example is with the Going Merry in One Piece, but I know there are others.

I really like it when inanimate objects or nonliving things become imbued with a spirit or will of sorts that surfaces as a result of a bond between people and that object (or magic, or both). By far my favorite example is with the Going Merry in One Piece, but I know there are others.

A lot of instances of that probably originate from a Japanese myth about objects coming to life after existing for 100 years (called Tsukumogami), although there are other versions of the story iirc.

I dislike characters being brought back from the dead and love it when they build up these lovable awesome characters then viciously murder them with no 2ND chance. Star Wars: the clone wars did this a lot and it was great. Domino Squad was exactly that, and it was awesome.

Every sci-fi/fantasy with a character with physic powers has a scene where some other character wants them to move something huge with their willpower and then think of something that will make them mad or powerful, which brings us to a series of quick emotional flashbacks.

Okay maybe not every - but it's starting to be a thing. The Empire Strikes Back seems to have started it, which was good. Then X-Men First Class did it, which felt hella cheesy. Then Stranger Things 2, which I immediately was like "Okay, I see where this is going" and tuned out in my head.

Overhearing some Star Wars discussion recently reminded me of one I'm really tired of that's almost universal in sci-fi: Treating interstellar civilizations like modern nations and planets like states or cities. I'm sure there's some story out there that avoids both of them, but everything I've found so far does at least one.

Sticking with Star Wars, it's one of the best examples of the latter. Every planet is defined by a single characteristic, and everything of importance on that planet is seemingly within a few square miles. Knowing that something or someone is on planet X is usually treated like you've already found them, when in reality it should be as useful as being told that I've hidden a pot of gold somewhere on Earth. If you replace the Death Star with nukes and space battles with sea battles (which they basically already are), I think you could pretty easily set the entire series (and everything I've seen from the EU) on a single planet without losing much of anything.

Mass Effect is the best example I've got of the other one. For as much thought and detail as they put into that universe, they can hardly go a sentence without referring to "Asari culture" or "Hanar religion", which is just silly. Nobody would ever refer to human culture or religion in universal terms today, and we're just a few billion people on one planet. How could it ever make sense to do that to trillions of individuals scattered across an entire galaxy? Like with Earth Wars, I'm pretty confident that you could just substitute all the aliens for Earth nations and be clever with the tech to write a story entirely set on Earth that nobody would ever suspect. ME is also somewhat worse than that since it treats all of the aliens like they have one universal trait, which is silly even from a national perspective.

Creating believable worlds with even a fraction of the complexity of Earth is obviously very difficult, but most stories barely seem to try. There's a ton of lost potential there.